An introduction to Registax

hi there my name's Steve Bassett and today we're going to be taking a look at a piece of software called register x-6 this software is primarily used by astrophotographers for processing video footage of the planets and the moons and turning them into some pretty some pretty impressive images you'll see it being used for solar photography and I'm very odd occasion you do see it being used for deep sky photography but that's not not very common a first port of call you're gonna want to visit the British Tech's website I'll drop a link in the description at the bottom of the video and it has quite a lot of information on here it's worth taking a very quick look at this preview tab up here and this gives a lot of instructions about what you're actually going to be doing and how to do things it can get quite involved it's definitely worth having a look at but I think sometimes the videos certainly certainly help to get your head around what a lot this doesn't abolish you don't need to do too much in the way of playing with the settings we're coming to that shortly all sort of run through a process with you to follow so firstly what you want to be doing mostly is you want to go ahead and download British decks I'm using the most up-to-date version there's no problem with it so I'd recommend going ahead and downloading that okay so once you've downloaded and installed ready Stax six don't end up possibly with a shortcut on your desktop so you can go ahead and open it so the program starts up fairly quickly and you know straight away there's lots and lots of settings to be playing with there's not a great deal to it there's a few settings that you will need to sort of have a play with it's a lot of stuff is down to personal preference but you can get through and end up with a decent image without doing too much to be honest with you actually um actually it's quite simple it's a lot easier than what a lot of people think I think a lot of people start the software up and see everything and think it can be quite intimidating but it really isn't isn't too bad at all so the first we want to be doing also we've been out at night got some footage of a planet or the moon and we want to come in and start processing it so the first thing we want to be doing is we need to open up our video footage so each need to see ideally it's already highlighted in orange for us it tells us that's basically telling us that that's something that we need to click on so I want to go ahead and hit select so I've got this pre-made footage of Jupiter that I took back in March 2014 which we're going to use for this so just quickly a case of actually something that's worth mentioning sometimes when you open it for the first time you may find it'll be set to TIFF frames that's obvious it's not going to show any any of your video footage you just need to make sure that the top file type is set to video and then it should show all the videos that you have and also you need to navigate to wherever you've stored your videos so I just go ahead and open up your video and there we have our videos to maximize the screen so that has our video there and we can actually run through the video if you just hold down on the up arrow it'll run through the video of Jupiter all the way you can see it counting up the frames just down the bottom you can see that I've got just over 2,000 frames a video footage of Jupiter that I took I think it's about three minutes worth of video something like that so the first thing we want to be doing and ideally it's underlined in green for us is you need to say our line points again there are lots of settings that can be used to sort of you can manually add you can manually add your alignment points if you want to to be honest I think the computer does a pretty good job motion at the time of doing it itself the only real option that I tend to change is is this one here if you look at the instructions you'll see there's lots of information on the website about about these particular settings and it does recommend that default is the setting that you would use on an image that fills the whole of the screen so a close-up of the moon for example would take up this entire frame as we're using the actual thing we're interested in is only quite small in comparison to the to the size of the screen they recommend that the 3x3 area setting is the one to go for now I'm not entirely sure why I don't I don't understand fully how how it works don't really need to to be honest with you I'm just following the instructions on the website of what they recommend but play with it the best thing to do is to play with it yourselves and see what works best for you so as say we've got a quite a small area of interest so we're gonna keep the 3x3 area selected we're not going to touch any of these settings down well this lot here I'll come on to the limit set up shortly I think we'll go through the actual alignment process first and then we can adjust that something I'll do else I do like to do is obvious we like to leave it in color you can turn the colour off doesn't make a massive amount a difference in this particular image but it might do in some of them show full frame you can just basically it gives you a bit of a zoomed view and something else I like to have is the registration graph switched on which is this graph on the right is empty at the minute because we haven't actually done any registration so we go ahead and we just click the align point and see what it comes up with so straight away you can see it selected five aligned points for us straight off the bat basically the align points are areas where you can get changes in contrast or changes of detail it's basically just something that software can use to try to align all of these frames together as we go ahead and start start the alignment process so we can go ahead and do that now I'm happy we're just going to leave those five five alignment points and see what we end up with at the end so now what the software is doing as you can see down in the bottom left is just it's just aligning all 2000 of these frames for us it depends on how fast your computer is - how quick it'll do this and I've had computers in the past where it doesn't seem to take an age but this one's not too bad okay so after the computers finished aligning all of our frames you end up with registration graph with some information in it and what the software also does based on the align points you set it will select your best frame and put that at the start and then the worst frame will be at the very end so if we use the left and right arrows you can see if you look down in the down in the bottom left you can see that we are with wiss wiss clicking through the frames and you can see that they're no longer in order instead of actually being in numerical order they've now been replaced and put into order of quality and again if you look on the registration graph you can see the blue bar as we scroll through is slowly moving along all of the frames this is it's at this point now that really we want to select how many of these frames you want to use obviously we don't want to put too many poor quality frames into the final image but at the same time we don't want to have too few frames because also we want to try and keep our signal-to-noise ratio good in order to try and stamp out that horrible noise so this is where we coming into the limit setup so at the minute you can see that I do tend to always use best frame percentage it's really is the easiest way to do it and you can see as we've changed this percentage figure you can see the blue bar and the registration graph is moving to correspond if you look at that quality line you can see the quality doesn't really drop drastically it's not looking too bad so I'll probably tend to leave leave things at about 80% I'll do tend to use 80% most of the time too with you unless there's some real significant changes in that in that registration graph so we'll just go ahead and leave it at 80 percent and see how things look at the end again you can always come back and then try try different settings there's no that's the beauty of it you can try one thing if it doesn't work come back and have another go so off we've selected what what limit of frames that we're gonna we're gonna stick with and locks I'm gonna go with 80% we just need to go ahead and hit the limit and that basically locks in that that decision and to use 80% of the frames I'm not entirely clear what the yellow circles with the green lines indicate I've always wondered I haven't I haven't really found any information so if anybody doesn't know by all means leave a comment in the box and it'd be interesting to know next it takes us onto the stacking page so now we've selected our 80% of the best frames and as you can see that is there's equates to 1601 frames that we're going to stack so what it's going to do now it's going to take all 1600 frames and stack them on top of each other to give us our final image I don't tend to play with any of the settings in this sacking I don't never needed to I've never never really looked into what what they do it all just seems to work without it so we're gonna go ahead and do hmm I suppose you could if you wanted to there's there's drizzling which as you can see when ax is stacking so the work is reading that when active stacking will be done using drizzling and drizzling factor creating a two x enlarged final image sometimes that looks quite good again that's something you can check switch it on do a stack it doesn't look very good switch it off and stack again it's not term it's not the end of the world I tend not to use it too much it doesn't always look that good when I do it that could just be my equipment not capable of of capturing good enough footage perhaps but yeah we'll just go ahead and stack we're ready to go so just click the stack button and again you see the percentage bar bottom left working again it's the same as before this will be down to obviously the number of frames you're stacking and and the speed of your computer will determine how long this takes okay so the computers now finished stacking our 1,600 frames and has given us an image to look at as you can see straight away it's looking considerably better than before we started stacking in fact if we go back to the align tab at the top here you can see just make it frame there we go you can see it's quite noisy quite grainy but as soon as it's finished doing its stacking you can see again this just increased it smoothed it out quite a lot some of the surface details now really starting to to show out we've got some banding possibly great red spot there and I think we may have a moon moon as well that we've caught so that's really all there is to it the only final little bit we need to do now is a little bit of post-processing in Reggie stack source Lee you can still go into something like Photoshop or and and process it to your heart's content but in Reggie Stax there's this final tab at the top pik wavelet which basically just gives us the tools to to sharp and sharpen our image a little bit I don't tend to use any of these these functions up here and they just tend to stay as they are again I haven't really looked at what they do you don't really need to first sort this basic tutorial something a new feature that was added in Reggie stack six was this ability to use linked wavelets some people like it some people don't as you can see says ho which is quite good as you hover over when active settings of a higher wavelet layer will affect the next layer so basically what that's saying I think is that as you adjust one it has a slight effect on the other I'm not a great fan of it to be honest with you I quite like I quite like to leave them working separately and I think I think it for me personally it gives up it gives a better better image at the end but also again it's all down to personal preference so what we need to be doing is really just just laying around these sliders known as you can as you can see every time we let go the mouse will move it let go the mouse it'll change the image a little I begin to start sharpening it up really bring some of that detail of the planet out as we can just play around with these really until until your heart's content something that you might notice if you get too aggressive with it you can see just in fact if we go I will go into these functions in a minute but there's the option to have to get a zoomed view of the planet basically we need to do is if you can increase your zoom up here so we go writings for a little lettuce which is four times if we hold down the control key and move our mouse around on the disc you can see that it'll move the zoom beautiful so we've got the hutt the control key held so you can see somebody these rings are starting to to appear which is a bit of a unwanted side effect of sharpening so we just we can either back the sharpening off a little or we can use the D noise you can add a little bit of D noise which will help to just smooth out these rings and the downside of this is it will unsharp on the image a little bit so you've got to try and find a balance it's not it's not easy it's literally really it's just a case of playing around with these sliders until you get something that you think you're happy with I'm not going to spend too much time doing it because you know you can you can spend hours doing it if you wanted to it's really just to give you an idea of of what they're doing a little bit over the top but we'll leave it like that for now that's that's fine something that you can do that it's quite often good is occasionally you may find you get some some chromatic elaboration you get some some color differences around the edges of the planets you can sometimes clear that up with this RGB align function you need to make your box that appears just get it to cover the whole of the area that you want to actually have checked just like this you don't need to really play with it just hit yes to make button and it'll it'll run through it for you can see it working bottom left corner again it's just a lining all of although all the color channels for you sometimes it makes a difference sometimes it doesn't just something really that you can play with you can do a lot of other things here color mixing I mean I don't tend to play them too much you can you can view the history to Graham if you like you can see our RGB channels are fairly fairly well aligned anyway so that's really all there is to it there's not anything else really that I tend to use and it's the only thing you can maybe play with the color of sorry the contrast and brightness a little bit let's just clear away since we're just brightness contrast maybe can tweak the contrast a little again it's all comes down to to your own personal preference I mean you can see actually we've actually ended up with two moons in the image Great Red Spot got some nice banding detail not by any means the best Jupiter image in the world but it's good it's you know it's just certainly for someone who's just starting out it it's very good so you just suddenly want to be pleased with that's I think that's all we can really really talk about the next phase really is just to go ahead and save what you will find you see there's this dual button here something you'll find out so much in this image but if you were doing say for example some work on the moon and you had the full frame was actually full of an image of the close-up of the moon you've noticed that as you were adjusting these sliders and sharpening the image only only a small area would actually be sharpening almost gives you a preview of what your sharpening is doing it doesn't sharpen the whole image at once so what you need to do is once you're happy with this area that has sharpened up you like how it's looking you need to go ahead and click this dual button and it will then do the whole thing do your sharpen the whole image for you it's not if you forget it's not the end of the world because what will happen is and I can just show you if we just tweak this setting back a little bit if I accidentally went and hit the save image button before it can do all we actually remind you that you haven't you haven't sharpen the whole image and asked you if you'd like to perform it now so obviously the answer would be yes and that's all there is to it and go ahead and save it I always tend to save as a 16-bit TIF call it whatever you like give it a name and store it and that's what was to it I'll see any questions please leave them in the comments box below I'll do my best to answer them and yeah that's everything thanks so much for watching

Channel: Steve Bassett

Views: 13,413

Keywords: astrophotography, Registax, Tutorial (Media Genre), Amatuer Astronomy, Astronomy (Field Of Study)

Id: 0pvAc7h_hzg

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 12 2015